Free The Danube by Nick Thorpe Page B

with stone. Memnune used to come here as a child with her grandmother every Friday to light candles, ‘to honour the heroes’, she explains. And to make wishes, one with each candle. They always lit white candles, she stresses, not the thin, yellow beeswax ones favoured by the Orthodox Christians. Opposite Sari Saltuq's tomb is a spring famous for the healing qualities of its waters. A young Gypsy girl, perhaps fourteen years old with a cigarette dangling from her lips, arrives with her younger brother on a horse and cart. They smile sweetly at us, then wrestle a big blue plastic container down off the cart and start filling it. There is no running water in most houses in the Roma district.
    In his front room on a low hill on the far side of the town, Recep Lupu, the unofficial head of Babadag's Roma community, talks about the pride and the shame of his people. ‘We don't have a language of our own, it's more like a dialect,’ he says, sitting with his wife and mother-in-law in their living room, just off the steep, unmade road that is the Gypsy high street. On the wall hangs a huge carpet depicting the ‘Abduction of the Seraj’. His wife sits cross-legged on the bed, mythically beautiful in thetraditional, bright long skirts and headscarf of her people. Her mother sits beside her, a picture of stern, silent dignity. ‘We speak a mixture of words …’ Recep continues, ‘Bulgarian, Russian, Romanian, Gypsy and Turkish – it changes all the time – we shift between them. We are too ashamed to speak our own language.’
    Unlike most of the Roma in Babadag, Recep and his family are Pentecostalists. He has a very earthly explanation for giving up Islam. ‘If you are a Muslim, you have to marry a fellow Muslim. In the Pentecostalist church, you can marry who you wish!’ I look over at his wife, who smiles, shyly. ‘All her family are Christians too …’ The evangelical Protestants arrived in the Dobrogea region at the end of the twentieth century, and have launched an aggressive recruitment drive among the Muslim Gypsies to ‘save their souls’. The community has a parallel justice system, accepted by the Romanian state in disputes where only Roma are involved. Instead of punishment or retribution for crimes, the emphasis is on respect, honour and repairing the torn fabric of the community. The council of elders sits to hear all sides in the dispute, then issues a verdict designed to satisfy the injured party. The offender must pay compensation, or find other ways to make up for the harm generated by his act.
    Recep and his wife have only two children. That is unusual. ‘Most have five or six, occasionally ten or eleven. For myself, two is enough … but if God wants us to have one more …’ He exchanges another gentle smile with his wife. His youngest son accepts the gift of my pencil and sits down to draw.
    ‘The biggest problem here is poverty and the lack of education,’ his wife explains. ‘The boys just go to school to get a driving licence.’ You have to have finished eight grades of school in Romania to apply for a licence. ‘The girls finish four grades or even less. They have to stay at home to take care of the little ones because their parents go to work in other villages. The children get married very young. It used to be at eleven or twelve, now more often at fourteen or fifteen.’ Their main work is trade. ‘We buy clothes, cutlery, dishes, or animals in the wholesale market, then take them from village to village, to sell.’ Few Roma, if any, own land.
    ‘Do the young people today respect the traditions?’ I ask Recep's mother-in-law.
    ‘The young do not respect us. Many used to wear baggy trousers – a traditional item of dress among Muslim women – now they only wear them occasionally.’
    The number of Roma is hard to calculate. Recep estimates 3,500 in Babadag, but ‘many are on the road, travelling from place to place’. A sizeable number – several hundred, he believes –